Ghost Child (18 page)

I suppose we were three hours, maybe more, into our journey to Melbourne when Harley told me how much I reminded him of Mum. At first I thought our mum, but no, he meant his own mum, Ruby.

‘She’s into Cheese and Bacon Balls,’ he told me. At the time, I was putting one yellow-stained hand after the other into the jumbo bag between our seats. I’d taken my shoes off and was riding with my toes near the windscreen. We’d long ago lost metropolitan radio and now we were losing the fuzzy stations, too. John Farnham and Cold Chisel and the ditty that Deborah Conway sings about the fellow who leaves pubic hair on her pillow, it was all turning to buzz and static, so I switched it off. I had many things on my mind: the inquest we’d left behind in Sydney, and the stories about
me that were surely starting to circulate. I didn’t want to think about them, so I said to Harley, ‘Do you know we have the same dad?’

He said, ‘That’s what I’m told.’

I said, ‘You don’t think so?’ And he shrugged and said, ‘Mate, from what I gather, Mum had a few blokes around. Who knows who belongs to who.’

I said, ‘Well, I can tell you, we’ve got the same dad. You look just like him.’

I expected him to steer off the road, since I’d done that, metaphorically, when Dad was first mentioned to me, but Harley is steadier than me. All he said was, ‘Fair dinkum? Come on, tell me about it.’ So I told him. I said, ‘I was living with this couple I called the Childless. They had no kids and, from what I could tell, they took me in as some kind of experiment.’

Harley snorted with laughter, and said, ‘You’re kidding.’

I said, ‘I was an experiment to quite a few people. A
failed
experiment.’

He said, ‘How many homes did you go to?’ I told him the truth: I had no real idea. Four, maybe five? There was Mrs Islington; then came the Childless, and after that, the Christians, and then the motel, and the caravan park, and there was a woman, the one I called ‘Dry Foot’, because she had some kind of foot disease that made the skin on her heels all red and flaky. She was a weird one. She made it plain that she was in fostering
for the money and yet she had no money. All she ever wore was this beige-coloured slip, morning and night, a nylon thing with spaghetti straps, and all she ever did was sit in a floral recliner, one with an ashtray Blu-Tacked to the right armrest. She’d take off her shoes and say, ‘I need somebody to do my feet, Lauren.’ She kept a pumice stone in a bowl of water – grey water – near the recliner, and she’d get me to slough off the dead skin and rub cold cream between her toes.

I told Harley this, and he said, ‘You must have been glad when you got thrown out of
that
home.’

I said, ‘I didn’t exactly get thrown out of there. By that time, I’d figured out how to get
myself
moved. Most foster kids figure out how to do it, eventually. They get to an age where, if they don’t like somebody, they just tell the Department they’ve been molested. Simple as that. They’ll be moved before the sun comes up.’

Harley said, ‘You told the Department you got
molested
?’

I shook my head, no.

‘I told them that Dry Foot told me to
touch
her, and that was enough for them. If there’s one thing the Department doesn’t want it’s foster parents that touch you, because they can be liable if anything happens. So all I had to say was, “She makes me
touch
her,” and they came and picked me up and moved me.’

Harley said, ‘But not to Dad’s, surely?’

I said, ‘No. I was still at the Christians when Dad
came.’ See, from time to time, the Department would send my progress reports to Mum, in prison, and to Dad, because they knew who he was from the birth certificate, but apparently the old man never answered. Then one day, out of the blue, he just rang up and said, “I want to see her,” and the Department, being all for family reunification, seemed to think this was wonderful. They kept saying, “Your father, Lauren! Wouldn’t you like to meet your father?” I had to tell them, “I wouldn’t know him from Adam.”’

Harley said, ‘How old were you?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe twelve? They told me he was living with a brother. I didn’t even know he had a brother. That meant I had an
uncle,
and maybe cousins. It was a headspin.’

Harley had his eyes on the road. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. He looked happy enough to just be having a chat, but was he wondering what it might be like to suddenly meet his dad – our dad? I didn’t know. I wound the window down an inch and let the wind snatch the butt of my cigarette. I said, ‘So, anyway, I told them, “Okay, I’ll see him.” And the Christians were very pleased. Mrs Christian kept saying, “We’ll help you get ready!” They wanted me to wear a dress. God knows what they had in mind. Maybe they thought he’d come with a corsage.

I told Harley, ‘The Christians wanted me to wait for him in the lounge room, as though we were receiving
a guest, or something, but I wasn’t able to sit still, so I waited outside on the porch. It was like waiting for Christmas, except Mrs Christian kept coming out and asking me if I was all right, and if I wanted a cup of tea, and if I wanted lunch. I didn’t say a word, not all afternoon, and when it was almost dark, she came out and said, “Lauren, do you want to talk about it?” And I said, “No.”

‘He was four hours late, and then, there he was, behind the wheel of a brown Ford Fairlane.’

Harley said, ‘What kind of Fairlane?’

How was I supposed to know? All I could remember, really, was that he’d had some kind of repair job done so one door was grey. He parked up on the nature strip. I thought Mrs Christian would have a heart attack.

I ignored Harley’s question and said, ‘I remember I looked up and there he was and I just felt triumphant. I thought, “He’s
here
. He
came
. My Dad.”’

Harley said, ‘Well, come on. What did he look like?’

I said, ‘Like
you
. He was big. Big, and you know, one of those guys that just looks covered in sandy hair? And there’s all freckles under the hair? He looked like that.’

Harley said, ‘Fair dinkum?’

I said, ‘Yeah, and he had your head. Remember how you used to have this enormous head and me and Jake, we used to call you Moon?’

Harley said, ‘I don’t remember that.’

I persisted. I said, ‘Come on, Harley, how could you forget? Moon Head. You used to go spastic.’

He said, ‘I did?’ And I assured him, ‘You did. You went spastic.’

We drove on for a while, and then Harley said, ‘So, go on. He arrives, and he’s got this big head …’

I said, ‘Right. Yeah. His head was the size of a watermelon and he had these huge hands, all calloused from digging ditches or laying asphalt or whatever he did.’

Harley wanted to know how old he might have been. I guessed around thirty-five. I said, ‘He told me he was twenty when he met Mum. He was working on Barrett, on some kind of work-for-the-dole program, putting up a wooden walkway. Do you remember that walkway that we used to take to school, me and Jake?’

Harley shook his head, no.

‘No. Well, it was a walkway, made of pine planks, and you could use it to get to school, and he built that.’

Harley said, ‘Okay. And what did he say when he rolled up?’

I said, ‘When he rolled up? I don’t know. Probably “Hi”. He wasn’t a big talker. It was awkward, you know, like when you meet a new foster family and they say, “How old are you?” and “Do you like school?” and you never know what to say. The good thing was, he smoked, and he gave me a smoke there on the porch. Mrs Christian came out and said, “We don’t think that’s appropriate.” I immediately dropped mine into a flower
pot, but he took another drag, maybe two, and put it out on the footpath, with his boot heel.

‘And then he said, “I’m gonna take Lauren for a drive.” There’s no way that would have been permitted. There’s no way he would have been allowed to be alone with me. But as usual the social worker hadn’t turned up, so I followed him out to the car.’

Harley said, ‘Mrs Christian just let you go?’

‘To be honest,’ I told him, ‘I don’t know whether she did or not. By that stage in my fostering career, I was pretty sure there was nothing she could have done to stop me.’

Harley said, ‘So, where’d you go?’ And I said, ‘To his place.’

I leaned forward, pressed the cigarette lighter, and drew up memories of that day. My father’s car had smelled like Harley’s car. The vinyl roof was yellow, from cigarettes. There were empty fag packets on the floor and cassette tapes on the dashboard. One of them was broken; all the tape was hanging loose. I asked my father, ‘Have you got a pen?’ and he took one out of the glove box. It had what appeared to be a woman wearing a black dress on it; when you tipped it forward to write, the dress melted away, so the woman looked naked. I’d used the pen to wind the tape back into the cassette and asked him, ‘What’s on this?’ He’d taken his eyes off the road and said, ‘At a guess, Acadaca.’ I didn’t know who that was. I said, ‘Grouse. Should we play it?’
and he said, ‘You can’t. The tape player eats the tapes. Look in the glove box, you’ll find half a dozen if you want to wind ’em up.’ So I’d sat with the pen, winding spools of tape, thinking to myself, ‘This bloke’s my dad’ and, ‘I’m heading to my father’s house.’

He smoked all the way there. Like Harley, he held his cigarette between the two fingers he kept on the steering wheel, but he was right-handed, and every now and then, he’d wind the window down and throw the butt out, and I’d get showered with ash. I don’t remember what we talked about, except that he had a lot of complaints to make about the Department. He said things like, ‘You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole they put me through, to get to see you. I’m on the birth certificate and they treat me like a second-class citizen.’ I kept saying the words in my head,
My dad
. Not just Dad, but
my dad
. It sounded totally weird.
My dad. My father. My old man
.

Harley said, ‘So, what was his place like?’

I said, ‘He was living in a shed, basically, out of the back of his brother’s house.’

‘Mate!’ said Harley. ‘So this thing you’ve got for
sheds
… it’s genetic!’

But his shed wasn’t like mine. I had a granny flat. Dad had a
shed
shed. An old wooden shed. He’d let me open the door with a copper key he kept on a ring the size of a bangle. There was no plaster on the walls, just wall studs, and he had barely any furniture: a mattress
on the floor, from memory, and a kitchen, of sorts, with an old stove with four black burners kind of covered over in tin foil. There was a stone sink with an oversized tap, and a particle board, with the outline of tools – a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver – spray-painted on it, in grey.

There was something else, too. Between the wall-studs, there was pornography. Nothing hard core – there were no people actually having sex, not that I remember, anyway – but every wall was papered with centrefolds that my father had apparently taken from
Penthouse
and
Playboy
. There were pictures of women of the type you never see naked any more: fleshy women with bushy vaginas and fur under their armpits. There were women with big thighs and dimpled bottoms and east-west breasts, women with tan lines (two white triangles over dark nipples and another over their pubic hair), and women lying on transparent inflatable mattresses, with champagne glasses in their hands. It was the most glamorous, the most startling, the most unnerving thing I’d ever seen.

I told Harley, ‘There were girls all over his walls. One wall was devoted to black girls. Never in my life had I seen a black girl. I couldn’t stop looking at their pubic hair. It was straight and stiff, and the way one of them was standing, with her legs slightly apart, you could see the detail, it was incredible. Now, it’s everywhere, but then, Harley, I tell you, this was so, so naughty.’

Harley was wide-eyed and full of mirth. ‘So, what did you do?’ he said. ‘Did you leg it?’

I said, ‘That’s the thing. Dad didn’t even seem to notice. He was just all: ‘Do you want something to eat?’ And then he was making me an egg, and we were standing amid all this flesh and he was just putting a frypan on the burner, and breaking eggs into those aluminium rings that people used to have. We had it on toast, with these girls looking down at us, like it was the most normal thing in the world.’

Harley was smiling into the distance. He said, ‘That’s unreal.’ And I said, ‘Oh, it gets better. Next we went on the motorbike.’

He said, ‘Shut up!’ He didn’t mean, ‘Be quiet.’ He said it the way people say it on TV;
shut up,
as in,
no way! Really
?

I nodded, smiling, and said, ‘We did.’

There was a dirt bike out the back and when Dad asked me whether I wanted a ride, I said, ‘Of course,’ and he picked me up under the armpits and put me on the back of this thing. I hadn’t known where to put my feet and he’d put them in place for me, lifting each foot onto the pedals. He sat down in front, with both hands on the handle grips and said, ‘Hang on.’ I looped both my arms around his waist. He hadn’t given me a helmet. My face was turned sideward, and my cheek was flat was against the back of his shirt. The bike was rumbling through my groin. I could feel his thighs tightening when
he used the brake, and I was conscious of my young breasts, pressed against his back. I wonder now if he was conscious of it, too, because he stopped suddenly and said, ‘Okay, that’s enough, let’s walk it back.’ And we rolled the bike through the barbed-wire fence and parked it near his shed. I didn’t tell Harley this.

Harley said, ‘Did you like being on the bike?’ and I said, ‘I guess it was pretty cool.’

‘And, so, what next?’ said Harley. ‘When did you see him again?’

I took a cigarette packet off the dashboard and waited, in silence, for the lighter to pop. I was in no rush to answer. The truth is, he hadn’t come again.

I was in the kitchen when I heard the phone go, and from the kitchen I heard Rubes talking to Harley. I thought, ‘He’s a good lad. He knows how much Rubes needs him to ring.’

Then she called out to me. I went outside, and there she was in the Papysan, telephone still in her hand.

I said, ‘What’s up, honey?’ and she said, ‘That was Harley.’

‘I gathered that, honey,’ I said, and she said, ‘Gather this. He’s on his way here.’

‘Goodo,’ I replied, but in my heart I knew somethin’ was goin’ on. Rubes looked like she’d seen a ghost. I’ve known the woman more than twenty years. There’s not many of her expressions I haven’t seen. Rubes was looking out in the distance. I couldn’t quite make out what she was thinking.

She said, ‘He’s not alone.’

I said, ‘No?’ and Rubes said, ‘No.’

And still, nothing about her expression was familiar to me, which made me think, ‘It’s a girl. And not just any girl, but a special girl, because that’s the only thing that would knock Rubes’ socks off.’

Harley’s never had any problems with girls, which is quite different from me. When I was a lad, I gave women a very wide berth. Women were confusing to me, but Harley’s always seemed to be able to manage. He doesn’t scare ’em off, and he doesn’t draw ’em in. He told me once, when I asked him whether there was anybody special that was tempting him to move up north, ‘Tony, no. My goal is to keep around five.’ I said, ‘Around five?’ and he said, ‘I never want less than three, but I like to handle five. You’ve got to have the skills of a diplomat, but you can do it.’

So, we were used to Harley’s girls, and used to the idea that we might see one of them one day, and another the next day, and that would be ‘no biggie’, as he’d put it. Maybe this was different? Maybe this was something special. Maybe he was even coming to announce an engagement or a pregnancy, or even that unromantic, modern arrangement, ‘We’re going to live together!’

But Rubes said, ‘It’s Lauren.’

I’m ashamed to say that the name did not register, not immediately, but I reckon most blokes would react the same. I mean, people come and go, don’t they, and
after a while, I forget which cousin goes with what wife. Besides, it had been years, probably a decade, more, since I’d given any thought to the fact that Harley wasn’t technically my own boy, that he in fact had another family, including siblings. So I said, ‘Lauren,’ in the way that I hoped wouldn’t make it seem like I had some idea what Rubes was going on about.

She wasn’t in a mood to help me, though. She just said, ‘Lauren.’

I stood there for a bit longer, feeling a goose. I still had a knife in my hand, from when I was in the kitchen, and I don’t doubt that I had that expression that Rubes calls ‘stunned mullet’ on my face. I had no idea who she was talking about, which left me with no other option than to say, ‘I’m sorry, Rubes, but who’s Lauren?’

She said, ‘Lauren is Harley’s sister, honey. Lauren is Lauren
Cashman
.’

There was nothing I could do with this information without first putting on my searching face –
Are you okay about this, Rubes?
– and then, when that didn’t work, I said, ‘You’re kidding.’

She said, ‘No, honey. Not kidding. She’s in the car with him, and they’re driving here.’

Rubes had stopped staring off in the distance and was making herself a rollie. I couldn’t tell from the way she was busying herself with tobacco and papers how she was feeling about this, so I said, ‘Wow. That’s amazing.’

Amazing is a perfectly neutral word, isn’t it? Depending on how Rubes reacted, I figured I could make it mean ‘Amazing good’ or ‘Amazing, horrible’. I was happy to follow suit with Rubes. I didn’t want anything to hurt that woman, not then, not ever. If Rubes was pleased, I’d be pleased. If Rubes was wretched, I’d be wretched with her, and mad with Harley, too.

How did I myself feel? I can’t really say. My own opinion is not something I put forward all that much, and mostly I don’t have one. My idea is to have a roof over my head and some wood I can whittle, and I let Rubes take care of the office politics, as it were. But Rubes seemed determined to get a response out of me, without letting on what it should be, which was unnerving. She’ll do that sometimes: after so many years of marriage, in which she’s happily set the tone, she’ll suddenly decide she wants to know what
I
think, and honestly, like most of the fellas I know, I’ve given up thinking anything. She can tell me what we’re doing and where we are going, and how we feel about things. It’s easier that way, and truly I just don’t worry about anything too much either way.

So I did what I do when she gets this particular bee in her bonnet. I said, ‘Wow.’

She said, ‘Wow? That’s all you’ve got to say? Wow?’

She wasn’t angry. She was teasing me, which I must admit came as a great relief, because if she was teasing
me, it was obviously all right with her. Emboldened, I said, ‘How long have they …’

Rubes said, ‘Been together?’ She was chuckling now. We were talking like Harley had a girlfriend.

‘Not been together,’ I said. ‘I mean, yeah, when did they meet up?’

She didn’t know. She said, ‘All he told me, Tony, was “I’ve got Lauren in the car. We ran into each other. I’m bringing her home. Make up the beds.”’ She was sitting back in her chair now, blowing smoke toward the night sky, looking reasonably pleased with herself.

I said, ‘That is so Harley.’

She said, ‘Yep,’ and she said it in a way that made me think it was okay to plunge in. I hesitated for just a minute, and then I said, ‘You okay about this, Rubes?’

She said, ‘I think I’m happy.’

Relieved, I said, ‘Well, you should be.’

Rubes used to worry about losing Harley to his mother. Part of me was pleased when the mother died just because it put Rubes’ mind to rest on the matter. It sounds callous, I know, but as far as I was concerned, Rubes was Harley’s real mother, and anything else would have been a complication.

I’d never seen Harley’s sisters. There were photographs of them on Harley’s file, but it had been a while since I’d seen that. One time, the caseworker made Harley go for what they called a ‘contact’ visit with Lauren and the other sister at one of the Department’s
offices in Melbourne, I think after their mother died. Rubes drove him there; it was probably a condition of having him stay with us. She left him with the caseworkers and she told me later she drove around and around and couldn’t even tell me where she’d gone, she was just completely out of her mind because she’d heard of cases where the children go into the Department’s offices and don’t come back.

He did come back, obviously, and probably it was a positive thing, to get the kids together at that point, and perhaps it would have been good if they’d seen each other more often, but the system relied so much on everybody keeping their details up-to-date and being prepared to bring the children into the city office on the right day, and having a caseworker that was up with the latest developments in the family, and I suppose you can guess what happened. There were no more visits. Since Harley never seemed bothered, we settled into our own routine and considered ourselves a family. I guess we forgot, in a way, about the others … and now they were on the way to the house, or one of them was, anyway, and we didn’t know what we’d be in for.

Rubes said, ‘I wonder what she eats?’

I said, ‘Food, at a guess,’ and Rubes said, ‘I suppose she does.’

Now, there’s never been a time in our marriage when people were coming to stay and Rubes wasn’t planning two days in advance what to feed them, so I said, ‘Into
the kitchen with you, then,’ and she said, ‘They’re not here till tomorrow.’

I said, ‘Don’t let that stop you.’

I could see from the look in her eyes that she was still miles away, but she said, ‘We should make up the spare bed.’

I knew what that meant, too:
I
should make up the spare bed.

I said, ‘They’re not here till tomorrow.’

Rubes said, ‘Don’t let that stop you.’ So I went out the back and started yanking at the sofa bed, knowing that no matter how I made it, Rubes would soon be in after me, saying no, let’s use these pillows, and no, how about that blanket, but that was fine, so long as she was fine, too.